From Wisconsin to Middlesex (Part One)

How a baseball fan from Wisconsin became a Middlesex supporter.

I am a 54 year old Data Librarian at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin. I have been an avid baseball fan (I support Oakland Athletics--don't ask, that is another story entirely) for over 40 years, and recently retired from being a club player (fast pitch softball, a variant of baseball) after 23 seasons. Yet when the middle of April came along this year, it wasn't late night baseball scores from the US Pacific Time Zone that kept me up late, but wondering if the new ball partnership of Silverwood and Louw would give Middlesex some effective bowling this year.

How could this be? I am probably the only cricket fan in Madison who is not an expat from a Commonwealth Nation. When I talk about cricket to my friends from the states, their eyes quickly glaze. Yet I can start a cricket conversation with a stranger from the sub-continent or the St. Lucian husband of one of my wife's professional colleagues, and within a half hour I am receiving invitations to Beausejour, Colombo, or Lahore.

I was first introduced to cricket by the great Marxist historian C.L.R. James in 1986. After reading his classic _The Black Jacobins_, I looked into his writings and found a strange title: _Beyond a Boundary_. I was able to pick up a copy in a used bookshop and was enthralled by it. I could hardly imagine such a passion for cricket, leavened with such a sensitive portrayal of what it was like to grow up under colonialism in the West Indies. My edition of the book had a two page explanation of cricket that was unfathomable to me, as I had never seen the game. But James' discussions of players like Constantine and Headley informed me that great African Caribbean players had been playing in the West Indies, on an integrated team, since the early 20th Century. This struck me as interesting and different, coming from a baseball background.

Major League baseball had only integrated in 1947, when Jackie Robinson dragged it kicking and screaming into a new era while playing for Brooklyn, New York.  James was talking about the issue of a black Captain for the West Indies in the 1950s. There was no black manager in baseball until the 1970s, when Frank Robinson became the first at Cleveland, Ohio (Robinson being a player-manager, the exact analog of a Captain in cricket). So I was introduced to cricket, but with no exposure to the game, I eventually lost interest and returned to baseball.

Fast forward to 1996. At this time I was working for a US National Science Foundation Project called the Internet Scout Project, whose purpose was to promote the use of the Internet to the research and higher education community in the states. My job was to edit a weekly email newsletter called _The Scout Report_, searching and browsing the Internet for new and interesting sites, annotating them, and reporting them to an audience of 125,000 readers. Along with the science, mathematics, and liberal arts sites we found each week, we liked to occasionally add entertainment sites, so as not to completely fry our readers' brains. In March of 1996, I stumbled across Cricinfo for the first time. A team from Sri Lanka had just won cricket's World Cup, and so we wrote up the site, to go along with our baseball World Series, American football Super Bowl, and other sports sites. You can see the Scout Report annotation at:

http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/1996/scout-960322.html

Still, with no real TV or radio exposure, I eventually lost interest and returned to baseball.

Fast forward to 2001. The events of 2001 have had very different effects on people here in the states. For me, profound alienation was the effect; alienation from everything American. In late 2001 and early 2002 (the actual origins are hidden in the mists of memory), I  rediscovered Cricinfo. It was winter, so there was no baseball, only snow and cold. But here at Cricinfo was a bat and ball sport that was humming, seemingly as busy as could be (for reasons I would soon discover). The first cricket series I followed was a One Day Series between Pakistan and the West Indies at Sharjah (Mohammad Sami debuted with a hat trick), followed by England's tour to New Zealand (the series with "Astle's Match"). I read game stories but didn't really understand what was going on. Only that the game was played with a bat and ball, governed by laws instead of rules, had winning margins of runs or wickets, 33 different fielding positions, and terms which were completely foreign to me, like "loosener", "uppishly", "bouncer" (James had used "bumper", which I didn't understand either), "cut", "drive", "sweep", "googly", "arm ball", etc. In other words, learning cricket was going to involve learning a new language.

And so I did. I taught myself the cricket language in about a month, printing and reading CI ball by ball commentaries with my map of fielding positions by my side. As the game became more comprehensible to me, I read more commentaries, and started getting into a rhythm with it. At first I was only interested in something called "ODI" because the commentaries ran only about 20 pages and could be digested in an hour or so (even if I still didn't know much about what was really going on). My addiction to Test cricket began after reading Astle's match:
http://usa.cricinfo.com/link_to_database/ARCHIVE/2001-02/ENG_IN_NZ/SCORECARDS/ENG_NZ_T1_13-17MAR2002_BBB-COMMS.html

which printed out on my printer at 132 pages and took the better part of a week to read. It is still the best print ball by ball commentary I've ever read.
Still, I had never seen or heard a game. Luckily for me, the Caribbean Media Corporation broadcast all West Indies matches on the Internet. So the first match I ever heard was the 1st match of the West Indies v India Test series in 2002, at Georgetown. It was fantastic. The West Indies radio commentators never missed a ball, and never let a good story get in the way of the game, Though the game ended in a tame draw, it was compulsive listening for four days. When Carl Hooper made 233 there was a cacophony of noise and blowing horns that didn't stop for the entire 10 and a half hours he was at the crease. I never knew 13,000 people could make such noise and be so passionate. I was now hooked on West Indies cricket. I had no idea what I was getting into, but they were my "home" team, as they were closest to my home. I did some reading about West Indies cricket and learned of their great heritage, and the fact that they had been the greatest team sports dynasty in the history of team sports. This from a team composed of ancestors of African slaves and Indian indentured servants.

Why hadn't we ever heard of this team in the states?

Still, I had never seen the game. The first game I ever saw, on broadband cable modem, was the first West Indies v England Test Match at Sabina Park in March 2004. Watching the game was a revelation. Immediately I realized that this was a much more difficult game than baseball, much more unforgiving of mistakes. Much tougher. The last ball before lunch on the first day, Tino Best hit Mark Butcher in the helmet with a 95 mph bouncer. Butcher got up, smiled, tucked his bat under his arm, and walked away. No recriminations or fights, as there would have been in a baseball game. Being hit in the head is accepted as part of the game. Now I was totally hooked on cricket.